Living Room Learning

Intimate workshops and creative explorations in a nice cozy Brooklyn living room.

Living Room Learning is an event series focused on group learning and intimate workshop-style interactions…and all taking place in my living room in Brooklyn.

The basic theme and format builds off what I’ve been doing with Idea Exchange. Each event will be a few hours long, with somewhere around 6–8 people, exploring a particular theme or format or learning goal.

Why my living room?

It’s a cozy living room. It’s the perfect size for not too many people. It’s centrally located. And very convenient for me too.

What are some other things you thought of calling this?

How does it work?

I’ll propose a date and topic/theme, and, if you’re on the email list, I’ll let you know the details, upon which you can confirm your spot (and comestibles) with a token cash transfer to yours truly. I’ll arrange these sporadically, depending on when I feel like it and get around to it. If I’m really on my game I may eventually post a calendar here.

Part of the fun will be experimenting with format, but as a general rule I’ll aim to keep these small and casual. Just a couple hours, so they’re doable as an after-work thing; simple food and drinks, so they’re cheap, too.

What are some more specific examples of events, if you don’t mind?

Ah, for sure. Here are a few I’m excited about and will try to make happen in the coming months. If you’d like to propose a topic or format, or even volunteer to help guest-host one, please let me know!

Event Ideas:

Book Swap: Exchange books with friends; share ideas and favorite reads; provoke and stimulate and discover.

Guided Tour Through The Systemic Sublime [Workshop]: Examining how the best works in the “systemic sublime” genre help us understand the complexity of global systems.

Fictional Worlds and Paratextuality [Workshop]: Exploring the contexts and circumstances and edges around our interactions with stories — decoding mythologies, reading fandoms and footnotes, and more.

Exploring Nonlinear Narrative [Workshop]: A working group in storytelling and narrative networks; examining perspectives and structures, maps and recombinations, to map map out a taxonomy of possibilities for how stories take shape.

Inventing New Forms of Creative Writing [Workshop]: Playing with new genres and forms, from improvisational poetry to new media manipulations to threads and fragments and other potential or hybrid forms.

Intro to Deep Time and the Long Now [Workshop]: Looking at what these terms mean, why they’re important, and how we can incorporate them into our lives and perspectives, work and creations.

Build an Awesome Personal Library — and Antilibrary! [Workshop]: Exploring various ways of curating your own library of resources, on- and offline, books and digital materials, read and unread…and how to use them well.

Creative Launch Sprint: Create and launch a product (or Kickstarter campaign, or other specific and kinda-crazy-to-do-in-a-day thing), start to finish, in one day. Could be one project as a group, or each person doing one individually!

Journey through Long-Term Practice [Workshop]: Deepen your creative practice, explore its offshoots and implications — a group exercise in transformation and perspective-shifting.

Interested? Send me a note and I’ll let you know when I get some on the calendar!